Escaping The Prison Of Mainstream Culture: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Many people turn to conservatism and religion because they perceive — correctly — that mainstream culture is a fraudulent sham bereft of meaning and authentic values. Their solutions are misguided, but their reasons arise from a perception of a very real problem.
It isn't actually necessary to turn to religion or conservatism to find depth, meaning and groundedness; depth, meaning and groundedness are always abundantly accessible. But nothing about western culture makes this obvious, especially in the mainstream.
Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It's a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can't ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it's sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it's self-evidently phony, soulless and vapid.
This isn't something the left can just dismiss. There needs to be something on offer which meets these needs better than both mainstream culture and the regressive belief systems which caused so much suffering in the past.
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It's incredible how much money the Americans can afford to blow just on exploding stuff overseas. Their healthcare system and infrastructure must be phenomenal.
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Communism is such a non-thing in the west that western rightists have to make up imaginary communist threats to be afraid of, pretending devoutly anti-communist institutions like the Democratic Party and the World Economic Forum are communist, or that "woke" stuff is communism.
If you have to make up imaginary communist threats to give your ideology meaning and purpose, you have a dumb ideology. Making an identity out of being anti-communist in the west is like making an identity out of being anti-dinosaur. Stop being ridiculous and do something real.
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No normal person is asking for digital IDs or central bank digital currencies. They're being supplied without any demand, for the benefit of the power structures supplying them.
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If a western-backed Ukrainian offensive on Crimea leads to a series of escalations culminating in nuclear armageddon, only about 200 people in the entire world would think it was worth it, and none of them live in Crimea.
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So much is lost due to the fact that modern science and academia don't research western domestic propaganda and its effects, because they don't acknowledge the existence of western domestic propaganda. As a result, there are no studies or data anywhere on the most sophisticated and widespread psychological operation of all time. And this is of course because our academic fields are captured by the same influence interests as our media and tech and every other means of controlling the information westerners ingest.
This leaves us unable to scientifically study how we're being programmed at mass scale. Because there's not research and data, we can't even talk to most people about the most significant thing that's happening in our society. Unless you've spent countless hours researching the many systems of imperial information manipulation, it's hard to believe it's even happening.
This is the only reason those who talk about western propaganda and Silicon Valley information manipulation get branded conspiracy theorists. It's not because the evidence for our position on those issues isn't abundant, it's because it's not officially acknowledged and studied.
Domestic propaganda is the most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our civilization, because it causes people to think, speak, work, shop and vote in ways that perpetuate the status quo. You should be able to get a PhD in its study, but you can't even write a thesis on it.
The most important thing you need to know about our society is that all our means of understanding our world are being aggressively and continuously interfered with by powerful people who benefit from the status quo. They're actively meddling in our perception of reality.
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"It's incredible how much money the Americans can afford to blow just on exploding stuff overseas. Their healthcare system and infrastructure must be phenomenal."
The US can afford to hand over hundreds of billions of dollars over to Ukraine, but my insurance (Medicaid handled by a private insurer in this state) can't afford to cover a stress test. We must send more tanks and F-16s to a proxy war, but we certainly should never let heart patients have stress tests. It's too dangerous!
Western societies have suffered astounding levels of betrayal and abandonment in recent decades. I am surprised this isn't discussed more than it is. Our political elites have adopted the neoliberal ideology which has fragmented our societies and ruined our democracies.
I wish everybody would read Noam Chomsky's book Profits over People, especially the introduction by Robert W. McChesney where he outlines the effects of neoliberalism on societies.
Liberalism is dead in our societies and been replaced by neoliberalism-- it is the instrument of reckless criminal capitalism which has created so many billionaires and is synonymous with economic fascism-- which is what the Ukraine war is really all about .